Introduction

My corpus is on John Mayer, specifically his albums. I am an avid listener so studying and analyzing his music would of course be an interesting topic for me. With eight studio albums, John Mayer has a well-rounded discography that arguably spans across many different genres such as blues, pop, rock, folk, and country. This leaves significant room for analysis into his music. Having a discography that spans across various genres allows for different directions to be taken in terms of investigation. The first possibility is to look into how John Mayer’s music has changed over time. The second is that a comparison can be made between one or all of his studio albums and their possible respective genres to conclude how John Mayer adheres to said genre. And lastly, is to conclude if John Mayer follows any trends in his music that allow us to possibly define John Mayer’s main genre of music.

The objective will essentially aim to anaylze John Mayer’s music in various ways. The first level of analysis will be to explore his discography in search of any possible trends. The second level will be to identify how well one or each of John Mayer’s albums adhere to their possible genres. The conclusion of this study will be to see if it is possible to summarize John Mayer’s music in a single genre. An important consideration to note is that John Mayer obviously did not produce each album with the intent of sticking to a single genre. The aim therefore is to see if and how well each album adheres to a respective genre. In addition to this, an analysis will be made on Spotify’s “John Mayer Radio” playlist as it is a representation of what Spotify considers to be similar to John Mayer’s music. This will be my second level of analysis. This analysis will show who Spotify associates John Mayer with and it might reveal what, based on which musical elements, this association is based on.

Using the Spotify API, data from each song off of each album can be pulled and analyzed. Important considerations must be accounted for first and foremost. Although the Spotify API is a powerful tool for music analysis, it is not perfect in its analysis of music. Certain criteria are poorly measured or immeasurable for the Spotify API, elements such as emotions and lyricism are difficult to analyze through the software.